A man attacks flight crew with an improvised knife attempting to get access to the cockpit so he can crash the plane, all the while screaming that he’s a child of Dracula. Passengers subdue him and he’s arrested as soon as they land at Gatwick. That’s when the agents are called in, because not only is the attacker on a special, secret list (known Renfields), he was also attempting to crash the plane in Southwark in order to ‘destroy them all’.
Destroy who? And why Southwark?
That’s how I’d start the Cauldron.
Which begs a few questions, among them how I’d organize this multi-genre epic, and how I’d deal which changing story arcs bearing in mind this sprawling yarn takes in everything from Shakespeare to tomb-hunting shenanigans in Cairo. It’s vampires, vampires, all the way down, but what exactly is the thread holding all this together?
As described in the ground rules, there are four sections: prehistory, Elizabethan, 1930s, 1980s. The long-term plot revolves around a strangler cult that boils the remains of its victims in a cauldron, for divination purposes. This cult has been anti-vampire in the past but a takeover bid in the Roman era may or may not have permanently changed it to a vampire asset – that’s to be determined in play.
We won’t be playing in prehistory, or even Roman times for that matter, though we probably could; GUMSHOE is nothing if not versatile. From a timeline perspective, the action starts in School of Night.
Not necessarily in a playtime perspective, though. The great thing about a multi-genre chronicle is you can begin whenever you like and move to whichever moment in history best suits the narrative. Which is why I’m starting with a potential plane crash in the 1980s. Start with action. You don’t get much more action than an abortive attack on a major metropolitan era, and it’d get even better if you followed it up with a vampire attack on the Renfield suicide bomber. No witnesses, after all.
Imagine being on that plane. Passengers going crazy, the Renfield sweating blood and raving. Maybe only one player character is aboard and the other players have civilian characters for this brief scene – but what a scene it could be … After all, this is 1980-something, long before the security theatre we have now. Scans and searches were lax and best. You could still smoke on planes back then. All sorts of possibilities!
The opening scenes of every narrative, whether we're talking about an RPG campaign, a novel or a film, serve to establish two things: setting, and stakes. The setting in this case is London, mostly in Southwark, with some stopovers in Cairo. The stakes? Control over the government, through divination, which allows the vampires to infiltrate the corridors of power by being the only one who know what the future holds. By predicting what's to come they can guide their allies and catspaws to success, and therefore glory.
That means by the end of the opening scenes your players should know that there is a conspiracy, that it stretches back centuries, and that it revolves around divination through ritual murder.
Once those objectives are achieved, you as Director immediately switch genres to the next point on the plot graph, which is whatever you want it to be. For the sake of this example I'm going to say that the next point is School of Night, because I want to establish some backstory and the best way to do that is to let the players do the hard work for me. I want to get them involved in that mysterious revenger's tragedy written by Francis Harman, and the best way to get them to do that is to put them in a room with Harman.
My objective, once the opening scenes have been dealt with, is to define some of the parameters of the Conspiracy. The best way to underline the stakes of the game is to make it clear from the outset that the enemy are powerful and aiming for high stakes. The best way to do that is to show the enemy doing exactly that, by having them take a shot at the Queen of England, Elizabeth I. It might be interesting to hint that this same group tried to cement Lady Jane Gray's claim to the throne, but that the 9 day's Queen was outmaneuvered by the members of the School of Night. Now those same conspirators are plotting to put Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne, and it's up to the players to make sure that doesn't happen.
Point being, the best way to establish that the enemy is powerful and aiming for high stakes is to show them exercising power and aiming for high stakes. It isn't enough to say that they're bad. They must be seen to be doing bad things, and scheming against the characters and the Crown. There's got to be murder, got to be a hideous soup boiling in that cauldron, and the best way to demonstrate this is to have it happen. Think of it in the same vein as the Bond villain demonstrating the power of the super laser (or whatever it may be) by blowing up a few preliminary targets.
Diamonds Are Forever
From this point forward the plot evolves through player action. You can have the bare bones outlined in your text, but whether or not the players win or lose determines how powerful the enemy are in the next segment. The Conspiracy might be a scattered and beaten force in the 1930s, or they might be nigh untouchable villains, and whether they are or are not will be determined by how well the players do in School of Night.
OK, so far so good. But this is an evolving narrative so that means the characters are evolving too. Except where in a normal long-running game evolution is determined through experience (and the spending of experience points) that isn't as easy an option to model here, where the characters are changing from session to session. This week, Sir Henry in 1609, next week, Basil in 1930. How to deal with that?
Again, leave it to the players - but establish a framework for them to do so. In any game they're going to be earning experience points. Give them the option of doing one of two things with those points: giving their current character a boost, or spend the points on an artefact or benefit for another, future character.
Let's say Sir Henry ends the session with 3 points to spend. Sir Henry's player has the option of spending those points to increase Sir Henry's skill set or to use those points to benefit one of the other characters in that players' stable. This is especially useful if, in session Zero, that player either designed all their characters for all the sessions, or at least established a framework for future characters even if that framework is just a name and a few lines of backstory. That way the player knows, in advance, that there will be adventures featuring Basil the bookshop owner and therefore it might be handy to give Basil a boost to prepare him for the horrors to come. Or maybe Dorcas the Night's Black Agents spy, or Roger the Cairo tombhound.
I'd allow the player to do this in one of two ways:
Lineage, or,
Item
By lineage, I'm allowing the player to say that Basil is a descendant of Sir Henry and therefore has some of Sir Henry's characteristics. Or maybe some family legend informs Basil's decisions. However it works, Basil gets that boost because Basil is descended from Sir Henry. Of course, only Basil benefits from this boost. If Basil dies, the boost is gone forever.
By item, I'm allowing the player to create an item that Basil can use, whether or not Basil is related to Sir Henry. A magic dagger, say, that Sir Henry crafts to destroy vampires and which Basil, not knowing the item's backstory, is using in the 1930s as a letter opener. The benefit still exists; Basil has a magic dagger which can kill vampires. The difference here being that items can go missing, be stolen, or be passed on. The dagger isn't unique to Basil so Basil can give it to someone else, or have a fellow player take it from his cooling corpse. But it can also be stolen by the enemy or destroyed in some other way.
That's the first takeaway in a multi-genre game. Allow the players to establish a bridge between genres by letting them build that bridge with experience points. It could even be a pooled benefit. Say all the characters in School of Night collaborate to create a book that is passed down to the Bookhounds. There could be a lot of experience points invested in that book. But it is a book - it can be stolen or destroyed. Giving the players custody of an artefact like that, one which they created and have a personal stake in, is significantly better than letting them chase after the McGuffin of the week.
The second takeaway is one we've discussed before but which I'm going to reiterate here: find the points of commonality between the genres and play on those points.
Night's Black Agents is a spy game, full of intrigue and action. School of Nights can be a spy game, full of intrigue and action. Tombhounds has the potential to be a spy game (remember that sinister Nazi treasure hunter, Gottfried Frank) and is definitely full of intrigue and action. Bookhounds is full of intrigue and action, and even if the mouthfeel is a little different from the other games that's no bad thing. It's the commonality you're looking for, not the differences.
This can be reiterated by reminding the players of important locations significant in all of the iterations of the game: the Clink prison, London Bridge, the Devil.
Let's say the Clink is one of those touchstones. There are several versions of that notorious prison (it burnt down more than once) and there's a museum there now. It's not immediately clear when that museum opened. If I was guessing I'd say probably in the late 1990s/early 2000s, but this is fiction; it can open in the 1980s if that's useful for your game.
We've already established a timeline roughly corresponding to Prehistory, Elizabethan, 1930s, 1980s. Under the Four Things principle, we need Four Things that correspond to those four points in the chronicle history. So:
The Clink
Prehistory: when the cult was scattered by the Romans, one of the pieces of the Cauldron was buried here for safekeeping.
Elizabethan: Francis Harmon, a Catholic, spends some time here in jail and while at the Clink carries out rituals intended to evoke demons - but he evokes the Cauldron, instead.
1930s: some relic or satanic remnant of Harmon's demonic ritual still haunts this spot, and the Conspiracy is determined to harness this for its own ends.
1980s: the serial killer preying on people with his (her?) strangulation ritual seems to be using the Clink either as a base of operations or as the central locus for an occult experiment of some kind. Why?
Physical tags, The Clink:
Gloomy, the haunt of the desperate and the damned.
Violent. Things happen here - terrible things.
Desolate. It's easy to lose your soul in the Clink - or your mind.
Vampires. Agents of the Conspiracy enjoy special benefits while at this location.
This is enough to establish the location. If it becomes a major crux of the campaign you'd need more, but you can establish that during play. You don't need to establish that at the start, and you really want to avoid doing more than the basics if you can because you don't want to waste work. Remember, the Clink isn't the only location in the chronicle; it's one of many, perhaps dozens, in this particular Building. You're going to be doing this for all of those locations. Don't obsess over one when there are plenty of others that could end up being just as important, or considerably more so.
With this, you can use the Clink at any point in your multi-genre chronicle and you already know enough about it to place the Clink anywhere in your timeline. It's the same location, evolving. It has different significance depending on when your players encounter it, but it's the same place, with the same long-term role in the ongoing plot.
OK! I hope this was of use to you. With this you've got enough to build your own Cauldron, with its own plot arc and deepening, horrific mystery.
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